Alastair Cook faces up to another defeat during what has so far been a gruelling winter for the longest-serving England Test captain.
Photograph: Gareth Copley/Getty Images

England are bad at endings. The last Englishman to win his final series as captain was Keith Fletcher, who led his side to victory over Sri Lanka in a one‑off Test in Colombo and was promptly sacked by Peter May. It doesn’t have to be that way. Imran Khan’s Pakistan won his last series as skipper, so did Mark Taylor’s Australia, and Anil Kumble’s India. But it seems the best ending an English captain can hope for is a defeat, and that their careers, like those of our more disreputable politicians, often end in something more traumatic still. Nasser Hussain, Michael Vaughan, and Andrew Flintoff all came down with depression. Andrew Strauss’s schism with Kevin Pietersen split English cricket, as did Pietersen’s row with Peter Moores.

Alastair Cook has been leading England for four years now, and 55 consecutive Tests. Which is already more than any other English captain, before you add in the two he played as a stand-in for Strauss in Bangladesh in 2010. His longevity alone means people would likely be thinking about whether and when he will call it quits. Then, in an interview with the Cricketer this year, Cook said: “Deep down I don’t know how much longer I am going to carry on. It could be two months, it could be a year. I do look forward to the day when hopefully I can play a Test match as just a batter, there’s no doubt about that.”

Cook has since said it was simply an honest answer to a hard question, that he only meant he was taking the job one series at a time. But, after two listless defeats in India, he and the team are now addressing questions about his future, as if, having turned on the hot tap and turned his back, he now finds himself enveloped in steam. There’s an echo here of Strauss’s observation about his own career: “What started as a couple of whispers had spread to become the main talking point before the game: is Strauss reaching the end?”

It’s not Cook’s captaincy that caused the team’s defeats, rather the Englishman’s constitutional inability to cope with Indian conditions. But he bears some responsibility for the character of their performances. It’s as if he has been encouraging them to play in the same sort of way that brought him so much success in 2012. And it was interesting to hear Trevor Bayliss say that he felt this was the right time for the coach to take on a greater role in the dressing room, because the batsmen had lapsed into playing too defensively and it is his job to remind them to be more positive in their approach.

Cook, of course, has been through similar things before. He said himself that he almost resigned after England’s defeat against Sri Lanka at Headingley in 2014, and he came under intolerable pressure in the following winter and spring, before he scored a century – his first in two years – against West Indies the following May. So he has his own past on which to draw. But once this current series is over, he would do well to talk to his three predecessors, Hussain, Vaughan, and Strauss about their experiences. Because there are lessons to be learned which may help him, and the team, in the future.

There are some obvious similarities. All three had lost the ODI captaincy, and all three later admitted that they had held the thought of retirement in their minds for a long time. If their decisions came as a shock to any of the rest of us, they certainly weren’t to the men themselves.

In his autobiography, Hussain wrote that he “knew deep down it had gone” from the moment Vaughan took on the one-day side. He offered to resign before his final series started, but Duncan Fletcher talked him out of it. Strauss says he made “a silent vow” with himself in April 2012 that he would “leave on his own terms” later that summer. Vaughan told his wife he would step down “whatever happened in those next two games” against South Africa in the summer of 2008.

More than that, their three autobiographies provide a real reminder of how hard the job is, and exactly how much it takes out of a man. In his last summer, Hussain came down with stress-induced irritable bowel syndrome. He says he was “on edge, physically and mentally”, that he felt as if “the walls were closing in”, that he had begun to “hate” the game. Likewise Vaughan. “I felt like a zombie inside, and all I wanted to do was sit down and retreat inside myself,” he wrote. “I was starting to hate the game, and the appetite for battling and fighting that had served me well had left me.”

Both men became paranoid, began to believe that they had lost both the team and their touch. “I used to feel that their ears would prick up when I opened my mouth, I now thought that they were switching off a little,” Vaughan wrote. And “it seemed that whenever I moved a slip out of the cordon, the ball would automatically fly through the gap”. Here’s Hussain: “I stood there in the field and thought, ‘I’ve lost this side’. There were new players in the team and I had to find new energies to lead them. I found I lacked enough energies in reserve to rise to the challenge”, and “whatever I tried in the field failed to work”.

Strauss saw all that, and promised himself he would not make the same mistakes. But even he became weighed down by “mental baggage”, found himself “having to confront more weighty and less easily answered questions such as: ‘Am I experiencing a gradual downward spiral?’ and: ‘Am I still motivated to keep doing all of this?’”

In the end he realised: “I wasn’t enjoying my cricket any more. I felt as if I was just hanging on, both with my batting and as a captain.” Just like Hussain and Vaughan, he made the mistake of thinking he could set himself new goals – he wanted to play 100 Tests – and that they would be enough to sustain his game, but he found instead that they confused his thinking and caused him to go on too long.

There is no urgent need for Cook to quit. But that doesn’t mean he has to leave it until either he or the team are in crisis. He is a proud man, and stubborn. Those qualities have served him well. But he has an opportunity to do something none of his predecessors could, and engineer a graceful end to his own captaincy and a smooth transition to the next man. Then he can take up a place in the slips, serve as the team’s elder statesman, on hand with advice when needed. It would be some accomplishment if he can pull it off, and, more to the point, it would be such a shame if he waited until he fell out of love with the game, as Hussain, Vaughan, and Strauss all did before him.

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